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The lengths someone has needed to go to find out whether something is edible, not poisonous, etc…
“Damn, Mike boiled these mushrooms once and died. What if I boil them once more? Hmm, tastes okay. And I didn’t even die!”
You mean starvation. Historically starvation is how they learned what will and wont kill.
*europeans.
People in the americas had been eating them for a long ass time by the time the Columbian exchange happened
Not just Europeans, from the article: “As Andrew F. Smith details in his 1994 book The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture and Cookery, before the fruit made its way to the table in North America, it was classified as a deadly nightshade”
it was classified as a deadly nightshade
It’s worth mentioning that while this seems insane to us now, it probably made a ton of sense at the time. The key is that tomatoes are in the same botanical family, so the plants have a lot in common. For example, here’s what black nightshade fruit looks like:
You might see something that and think it resembles a dark tomato. Hundreds of years ago, people looked at a tomato and saw a red nightshade.
According to the tomatoes Wikipedia article, tomatoes were definitely domesticated and eaten by indigenous folk in the americas by 500 BC.
My point is that the people who domesticated the tomato never feared it. Europeans propagated the myth that it was harmful and people who’d been eating it for millennia never took that seriously.
